"I introduce people to the places they're destined to love."

As Director of PlaceMakers' PlaceProven Marketing, Scott Doyon helps developers, town planners, and municipal leaders illuminate the often unrecognized benefits of well-conceived places, and then builds powerful emotional connections with the people who bring them to life.

It's a role that began during his 12 years with advertising giant J Walter Thompson, advising global clients in brand marketing and communications strategy. While there, he became acutely aware that conventional marketing rarely acknowledges the real-world environments in which products are used. In time, the reason for this became obvious. After all, what's so alluring about a BMW Z4 ragtop when it's stuck in traffic on the way to a strip mall?

It was a revelation. Increasingly, he theorized, people are going to begin demanding communities that rival their stuff in terms of beauty, convenience, quality, value and, most of all, choice. And so began a roundabout journey through urban planning, sociology and cultural critique — and a newfound perspective on the relationships between people and the places they inhabit.

Call it seeing the light. Waking up and smelling the coffee. Whatever it is, he now shares it with clients of all shapes and sizes, doing what he calls making sense of place. A Mass Communications graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University and an active member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, he lives and works in the historically platted, new urban wonderland of Decatur, Georgia.

E-Mail:
s c o t t @ p l a c e m a k e r s . c o m